I've had three distinct careers: biomedical scientist; FDA drug regulator; and scholar at the Hoover Institution, a think-tank at Stanford University. During the first of these, I worked on various aspects of gene expression and regulation in viruses and mammalian cells. I was the co-discoverer of a critical enzyme in the influenza (flu) virus. While at the FDA, I was the medical reviewer for the first genetically engineered drugs and thus instrumental in the rapid licensing of human insulin and human growth hormone. Thereafter, I was a special assistant to the FDA commissioner and the founding director of the FDA's Office of Biotechnology. Since coming to the Hoover Institution, I have become well known for both contributions to peer-reviewed scholarly journals and for articles and books that make science, medicine, and technology accessible to non-experts. I have written four books and about 2,000 articles. I appear regularly on various nationally syndicated radio programs. My most frequent topics include genetic engineering, pharmaceutical development, and the debunking of various manifestions of junk science.

Neither Individuals Nor (Especially) The Government Should Support 'National Politically Correct Radio'

NPR–“National Politically Correct Radio”–has a long and sordid history of bias, which is obvious in both the attitude of its reporters and the content of its programming. The coverage of genetic engineering is particularly unfair and inaccurate. Why should the federal government subsidize and lend respectability to this left-wing, anti-science propaganda shop?

The political leanings of many of National Public Radio’s prominent reporters and commentators are hardly a secret. Nina Totenberg, NPR’s veteran legal affairs correspondent, is the poster-child for the network’s inflammatory, mean-spirited, left-wing vitriol. She said in 1995 about then-Senator Jesse Helms (R-N. Carolina), an ultra-conservative Southerner who staunchly opposed civil rights legislation: “I think he ought to be worried about the–about what’s going on in the good Lord’s mind, because if there’s retributive justice, he’ll get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will get it.” That’s not so much political as just plain vile.

Totenberg also dismissed then-Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito as “some white guy.” (Not surprisingly, she seems pleased with the liberal mediocrities appointed to the Court by President Obama.)

Following the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), who years earlier had availed himself of the “Massachusetts Kennedy family exemption” from prosecution after callously leaving Mary Jo Kopechne to drown after he drove his car off a bridge, Empress Nina granted forgiveness: “He’ll be remembered as a truly Shakespearean figure: tragic, flawed; who in the end achieved redemption through greatness—both in his personal life and in his professional life, and did enormous things for millions and millions of people.”

In the interest of balance, perhaps NPR’s crack legal affairs reporter should have sought a comment from the Kopechne family about Kennedy’s “redemption through greatness.”

On Oct. 10, 2010, Totenberg offered this penetrating analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a free-speech case that opened up political campaign contributions and was toxic to liberals: “Well, you know, really, this is the next scandal. It’s the scandal in the making. They don’t have to disclose anything. And eventually, this is the kind of thing that led to Watergate.”

It is hard to square the way that Totenberg wears her politics on her sleeve and repeatedly displays venom in her public utterances with the NPR policy on outside appearances: “NPR journalists should not express views they would not air in their role as an NPR journalist.” It was the alleged violation of this policy that got commentator Juan Williams fired in 2010 after he had expressed some personal discomfort at seeing people in “Muslim garb” on airplanes.

The obvious question: Would Totenberg get away with wishing AIDS on a politician’s grandchildren in her news reports?

There are numerous other ways in which NPR and its affiliates reveal their biases–which are manifested not only by political favoritism but also by a kind of back-to-Nature, New Age-y fundamentalism that embraces environmental myths and hyperbole and is systematically antagonistic to certain sectors of science and technology. The “Living on Earth” program, in particular, seems to reflect reporting from a parallel universe devoid of balance or objectivity in which every radical environmental anxiety and prejudice is accepted uncritically.

The nationally syndicated Diane Rehm show, whose selection of guests is a veritable showcase for systematic bias, is consistently anti-science and anti-technology while it promotes big and paternalistic government and pillories the Right. Rehm views representatives of self-interested, anti-industry, radical NGOs as offering worthy and objective expertise while genuinely disinterested academics or industry-affiliated scientists are treated as shills and hucksters.

Rehm and others at NPR seem to have it in for genetic engineering in particular. One example was Rehm’s January 3, 2012 program on the labeling of genetically engineered foods, a bash-fest dominated by a rabidly anti-science, shamelessly mendacious (and self-interested) friend of Rehm’s who heads an organic yogurt company. Predictably, it became an exercise in advocacy for government-mandated labeling, although such a requirement is demonstrably misleading and unnecessary and according to federal appeals courts would violate the constitutional guarantee of commercial free speech.

Among the most egregious transgressions of fair, professional journalism was a series of programs called “The DNA Files” which set up a false moral equivalence by juxtaposing the views of Princeton University Professor Lee Silver against those of Margaret Mellon, long-time NGO-dweller, troglodyte and antagonist of any and all applications of biotechnology. This pairing was a paradigm of NPR’s notion of “balance”: a mainstream, non-ideological academic versus an intransigent, anti-industry, anti-technology, uneducable activist.

Another baseless assault on genetic engineering occurred in December 2011, when on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund was permitted to excoriate the genetic engineering of plants without any opposition or correction. It was particularly ironic because the subject of the segment was “A Planet Running Low on Water,” and genetic engineering’s greatest boon to food security and to the environment in the long term will likely be the ability of new crop varieties to tolerate periods of drought and other water-related stresses. (One drought-resistant variety–of corn–is already available commercially in the United States, and many more are in advanced stages of the development pipeline.)

Where water is scarce, the development of crop varieties that grow under conditions of low moisture or temporary drought could boost yields and lengthen the time that farmland is productive. Even where irrigation is feasible, plants that use water more efficiently are needed. Agriculture accounts for about 70% of the world’s freshwater consumption- and more in areas of intensive farming and arid or semi-arid conditions, so the introduction of plants that grow with less water would free up much of it for other uses.

Where does genetic engineering come in? Plant biologists have identified genes that regulate water use and transferred them into important crop plants. These new varieties grow with smaller amounts of water or with lower-quality water, such as recycled water or water high in natural mineral salts. For example, Egyptian researchers have shown that by transferring a single gene from barley to wheat, the plants can tolerate reduced watering for a longer period of time. This new, drought-resistant variety requires only one-eighth as much irrigation as conventional wheat and in some deserts can be cultivated with the meager rainfall alone.

Ever creative, Living on Earth even managed to find an activist to trash the genetic engineering of trees that will provide fast-growing and reduced-lignin varieties for more sustainable sources of timber, paper and biofuels. (Don’t producers or editors vet the content of these programs?) Her actual objection concerned commercial tree plantations that contain a single genetic variety–that is, monoculture–but she wasn’t smart enough to understand that that issue is distinct from concerns about genetic engineering.

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Henry: As an MIT/UCSD-trained clinical researcher, how is it that you think name calling and selecting quotes that fit your preconceived ideas represents an argument? I am a scientist myself, trained in molecular biology research. Show me data on NPR’s reporting and I’ll consider it. When I listen to NPR, I hear balanced reporting unlike some other media outlets (i.e., MSNBC and Fox). Taking poor “Empress Nina’s” decades of reporting and selecting a few quotes she probably regrets doesn’t make a very compelling case. Your chief argument focuses on one NPR show, Living on Earth, which I’ve never heard. You use this to damn the whole network. One could just as easily argue that NPR needs MORE public money to hire more qualified science-trained journalists for its science reporting.

APM, American Public Media, too. Garrison Keillor still offering up simple-minded anti-Bush rhetoric 6+ years out of office – with never an unkind word about the incompetence of Obama. And Marketplace with David Branliberal, sorry, David Brancaccio, who never met a market he could like. Perhaps he’s moved on; I quit listening 20 years ago.

From “Famine 1975″ by Paddock, 1967, pg 56: “The world is on the threshold of the biggest famine in history. If present trends continue, it seems likely that famine will reach serious proportions in India, Pakistan and China in the early 1970s… Such a famine will be of massive proportions affecting hundreds of millions.”

From “Wall Street Journal,” 26 August 2014, Headline: “China Is Awash in Grain Crops, Surpluses Will Be Sold Into a Global Market Already in Oversupply.”

The real problem with GMOs is that their success hampers alarmists’ book sales and depresses all those effete academics whose soapboxes are kicked out from under them.

Every time I read one of this guy’s column, I get nauseated. Who’s paying him to write such trash? This one is full of ad hominems. He says he believes in science, that is, objective observation and reporting. What evidence of this is there in this particular column?

Good job, Henry! It’s nice to know that someone out there is capable of parsing truth from BS. I’ve tried all my adult life to do that, but you are much more eloquent than I am. I especially regard highly your defense of biotechnical modification of food & fiber crop genes, pushing back the envelope of ignorance that Prince Charles and the Hollywood glitterati have been cramming down the throats of an unsuspecting and ignorant public. Your condemnation of NPR, particularly that blabbering Totenberg abomination, is long overdue and much appreciated. Please keep up the excellent work.